5/07/2012 @ 10:00AM

The Land Of The Mountain Gods

Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinleys anecdotes from staid international conferences often carry punch lines. There was the summit on economic development where he turned the tables on growth-obsessed world leaders. In fact, it should be obvious to everybody that greater levels of material prosperity do not lead to greater happiness, he informed them. Then there was the mountain-tourism conference he slam-dunked in France. His Himalayan country considers its tallest peaks sacred: Ambitious climbing tourists in Bhutan arent encouragedthey are arrested.

Im really not sure why they invited me to speak, Thinley said one night last summer, gazing deadpan around his dinner table.

A droll, cosmopolitan man with a degree from Penn State, Thinley, like his fellow Bhutanese guests that eveningfour leading authors and media figureswas clothed in a gho, the belted robe that gives Bhutanese men a dressed-up-as-Galileo look. Thinley had gone the national dress code one better, donning ceremonial knee-high leather boots with upturned toes to welcome Connecticut-based photographer Kit Kittle, an old family friend, and me. The food served in his modest, immaculately white official residence, The Raven House, was just as straight-ahead local. It included versions of the national mash-up, emadatse, which combines ingredients like potatoes, cheese, and rice with chilies whose heat levels range from pleasantly sinus-dilating to throat-singeing to turns-your-head-into-a-cartoon-factory-whistle. While Thinley and Kittle reminisced, I sneezed.

Thinley, 59, is the first and so far only elected prime minister of Bhutans fledgling democracy, up and running since 2008. The former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, had announced the end of the absolute monarchy three years earlier before an audience of yak herders in a remote mountain village. One can only wonder what they made of it.

But the venue was well chosen in a country that, perhaps understandably, prefers to emphasize its Gross National Happiness (GNH)a census based on a 72-point indexrather than its small-cap-size, $1.6 billion GDP: Surveys of GNH consistently show rural farmers to be fundamentally more content than city dwellers in the capital, Thimphu.

The leaders of this Denmark-size nation of 700,000 have reimagined its political future, but Bhutan will continue to navigate its own course throughsome might say aroundthe 21st century.

Ever since Shirley MacLaine wrote about the placethen a hermit kingdom formally closed to tourismin her 1970 memoir, Dont Fall off the Mountain, Bhutans road-less-traveled nature has made it catnip to spiritual seekers. For the Hollywood soulful, the deeply Buddhist, gentle, eco-aware country has become the new Nepal. Brad Pitt showed up here to plant trees; Cameron Diaz and Eva Mendes filmed a World Wildlife Federation special; and a host of others (Keanu Reeves, Demi Moore, Sting, Jennifer Lopez, Uma Thurman and father Robert) have flown in to meditate, trek, or recharge.

What Bhutan has not become is the new backpacker destination on the Boulder-Goa-Kathmandu enlightenment-trail model. That is not a happenstance; it is government policy. For good or ill, scruffy foreign vagabonds are not an approved visitor category in a country that admits only about 27,000 closely regulated tourists a year, each of them scheduled to an advance itinerary and pledged to a $250-a-day minimum expenditure. Just going through the visa process feels like an experiment in social engineering.

You will fly in or out on one of the two aircraft operated by the national airline, Druk Air. No other airlines or private planes are permitted, and if you plan to return to Delhi, say, you will just have to wait until it is a Druk planes day to fly to Delhi. (The official line is that the legendarily dicey, drop-through-the-mountains approach to Bhutans only airport, in Paro, requires special pilot training.)

As we stepped off the plane last summer and into the pine-scented, alpine air at 7,300 feet, the surroundings felt closer to Switzerlandor, anyway, to a rustic, sepia-tinged fantasy Switzerlandthan to the Indian Himalayas in Ladakh wed left the day before. Maybe it was the passengers patiently queuing up instead of making every airport excursion seem like the escape from the roof of the Saigon embassy, or the uniform, quaintly carved timber-trimmed architecture, or the traffic flowing in orderly lanes, quietly and at an actual speed limit. In the context of its neighborhood, even Bhutans efficiency seems like another aspect of its quirkiness.

But you dont have to scratch the tidy surface very deeply to feel the full-on otherness of the place. Id had a pretty fair dose a few nights after arrival, about the time I found myself ghost hunting in a pitch-black mountain forest above Punakha at two in the morning. The outing was sparked by a casual remark back in the luxurious environs of the Aman Resort in Paro: The GM happened to mention a local haunting story, and I wondered if any of the Bhutanese staff had hair-raising tales of their own. As I sipped a gin and tonic and caught up on e-mail (working Wi-Fi!) in the dark-paneled lounge, I became aware of a quiet scuffling behind me. Entire departments of the boutique hotel had depopulated as at least two dozen staff members crowded in, awaiting their turn to talk.

There were accounts of rolling fireballs, of astral traveling, of witches magically flaying the skin off young men who spurned their advances, of whole ghost armies on the move, their horses and armor clearly heard clanking past at night. One man said he could point us to a mountainside in the former summer capital of Punakha, about six hours away, where he had seen fairy lights dancing in the midnight woods. So, yeah: As soon as the hotel could gain official approval for an altered itinerary, off we went.

We wound our way down along the ridgeline from Amankora Paro, overlooking green, fan-contoured rice terraces, picking our way between farmers coming the other way leading sturdy little ponies and cows comically caparisoned with bells and tassels. The hotel, built low to the treeline from native materials, was almost immediately lost among the blue pines and rhododendrons. On the valley floor, the ruined 17th-century dhzong, or fortified monastery, which caps the promontory across the way from the hotel, popped into soaring view, backed by 24,000-foot, snow-shrouded Mount Jomolhari.

Around another bend you could just see the impossibly perched Tigers Nest monastery, the countrys most photographed sight. Padmasambhava, or Guru Rinpoche, who brought Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan in the eighth century, established the monastery by flying to the top of its 2,100-foot crag astride a magic tiger. (If you visit Bhutan, you will trek the several hours up to the monastery. And you will understand why Rinpoche preferred making the trip on tiger back.)

Our gho-clad guide on the trip to Punakhalets call him Dorje, a common enough Bhutanese namehas the tough-guy good looks of a young Harvey Keitel, and the self-assurance to match. The day before he had taken us to see the national sport, an archery contest between Paro and Thimphu, with avenues of banners and tented pavilions straight out of the Middle Ages. (Albeit with particular Bhutanese touches like heavy drinking among the archersstill astoundingly accuratedaintily kira-clad cheerleaders, and ritual singsong trash-talking between the teams.)

But today, relaxing into the companionship of the road, Dorje described the other national sport: night hunting. This generally involves a ladder, or at least sound climbing skills, and an absent husband or drunken father (who wont wake up when a randy young suitor pops through the second-floor window of the communal family sleeping room and whisks his daughter out for a moonlight frolic). Common though it is, most fathersand some husbandstake umbrage, and injuries from tipped ladders and beatings are part of the game. We Bhutanese want to be MBAs, Dorje explained. Married But Available.

There is also the matter of the penis paintings. The Bhutanese, so outwardly demure, so disapproving of public displays of affection, think nothing of decorating the fronts of their houses with R. Crumbesque drawingssome coyly beribboned, some winged, some apparently generating flames. You will notice a few examples around town up near Paro, but on the road to Punakha these decorations are as common as potted plants.

The genitalia, says Dorje, celebrate the teachings, or, anyway, the rowdy example, of Lama Drukpa Kunley, a.k.a. the Divine Madman. A 15th-century monk, the Madman called out the hypocrisy of his ageand evolved supernatural, demon-smiting powersby drinking heavily, singing lustily, and chasing everything in a kira. These days, these legends connote fertility. A friend in New York swears the Madmans magic is still fully functional: She became pregnant within weeks of being tapped on the foreheadconked is how she puts itwith a giant wooden phallus by one of Lama Drukpas devotees near Punakha.

A villa in Uma Paro’s parklike grounds.

Where the ghostly forest lights fit into the Bhutanese religious spectrum is another question. Back in Paro wed heard various theories as to what they might be, but there was universal agreement on one fact: They were to be avoided. One informant said that in her home village you were told that whistling kept them away, and the nighttime streets there resounded with breathy music. Dorje, no surprise, had a brasher tale. As a child he had shouted hello to the lights, eliciting a satisfyingly freaked-out response from his parents.

Soon after nightfall, we took up positions on the Punakha hillside, photographer Kittle, the sporting then-GM of Aman Resorts nearby outpost, and me. Wed drift together to fish out sandwiches from the hotel cooler, refill our cups from my duty-free bottle of Makers Mark, swap a lie or two. Then wed split back up to peer into the blackness.

We never did see the spook lights. But it was very quiet and velvety dark, and the air was a cool tonic. The sky was a dense spray of stars. It was one of the best nights of my year, and it wasnt just the Makers.

A few days later, Jigme Thinley would tell us that the forces of nature that surround themthe uncertain weather in the mountains, the torrential riverskeep Bhutanese people humble. I think I was feeling something like that that night on the hillside. I seriously wanted to see those lights, I worked at it, but this was a big world out here, a fine place to be curious in, and an impossible place to know. Whether coming so far to gain such a moments understanding is worth it, after all, is something every traveler must decide for himself.

Being In Bhutan

Aman Resorts Amankora offers six lodges around the country, from the gateway city of Paro far east to Bumthang, all with the hoteliers much-imitated version of low-key luxury that puts the locales in the foreground.